Donations

In april 2005, OS2 World.com started a petition to try to convince IBM to release OS/2 as open source to the current customers that want to keep OS/2 and for those long-time users who are considering migrating to another OS.

The petition was signed by 11.613 people and sent (2005.11.01) to IBM.

The current status is that we have sent of the petition (as a letter accompanied by a CD) to Sam Palmisano, CEO at IBM including copies to Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Jan Ekesiöö, Nicholas Donofino and Steve Mills. The final count of valid signatures by the closure of the petition was 11.613! So the question here is if IBM corporation can ignore almost 12.000 people or if they at least will make a statement about the topic since there has been a huge interest from the media as well. We will keep you informed if we get any kind of information or reaction from IBM Corp.

As of today, the 23 of December 2005, IBM does not sell OS/2 anymore, with standard support ending on december 31st, 2006. But for the OS2 community this has been a fact since many years already. Due to this, Serenity Systems International (USA) developed eComStation, an OEM version of OS2. eComStation is distributed by Mensys BV (The Netherlands). eComStation is still under very active development, a beta version of eComStation 2.0 has just been released and a Demo CD can be freely downloaded for evaluation. Serenity also initiated the development of OpenOffice.org for OS/2 and eComStation to provide users with a current and compatible office suite. From SciTech Software Inc brought us the universal graphics driver SciTech SNAP Graphics driver with support for the latest graphics hardware in one simple to install package. From Netlabs.org there are several ongoing projects; the UniAud - universal audio support for a wide range of audio chips, as well as the GenMac Wrapper driver that acts as a wrapper for Windows NIC and wifi drivers so one can use them on OS/2 and eComStation. InnoTek (Germany) and Golden Code Development Corp (USA) have their respective releases of J2SETM platform for OS2 and eComStation.

OS2 World.Com has recently initiated a Bounty System where corporations and individuals can sponsor development projects, as well as make suggestions of needed new projects. This project is organized together with OS2 User Group in Sweden - which puts in time to handle the system, and funds many of the bounties.

In short: development is far from dead when it comes to OS/2 and eComStation. It would be great if we could achieve to get (parts of) the OS/2 source code revealed and sincerely hope that this petition at least will open up a dialog with IBM regarding this topic.

The entire OS2 World.Com staff would like to thank everyone that has signed the petition